Romania

Author(s): Keith Hitchins

Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 4 (Oct., 1992), pp. 1064-1083
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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Historiography of the Countries of Eastern Europe:
Romania
KEITH HITCHINS
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC UNCERTAINTIES since the overthrow of the Ceausescu
dictatorship in December 1989 have raised urgent questions about the path of
development Romania will take in the coming decade. The critical issue is
whether the country will follow the Western example of a market economy and
parliamentary democracy or choose another model closer to its agrarian socio-
economic and Eastern cultural heritage. The controversy has rekindled a national
debate of long standing about the nature of modern Romania and its place in
Europe: whether, in effect, Romania belongs to the West or to the East. It has
revolved especially around fundamental processes of nation-building that origi-
nated in the first half of the nineteenth century-the creation of new political and
economic structures and integration into Europe. A review of these processes and
the reaction of Romanians to them may serve to put the issues facing contempo-
rary Romanian intellectuals and politicians in perspective.
From the early decades of the nineteenth century until World War II, the
formation of a modern nation-state absorbed the energies of one generation after
another of Romanians.' The achievement of national political goals had priority:
from the preservation of autonomy for the principalities of Moldavia and
Wallachia in the 1830s and 1840s down to the emergence of Greater Romania in
1918. At each stage, the initiative belonged to the Romanians. But crucial to their
success was their ability to position themselves advantageously among the great
powers, a strategy they themselves recognized was necessary in order to harmo-
nize national aspirations and international realities. Although they sought sup-
port mainly from the West, they received no special treatment from that quarter,
except when it suited Western purposes. At first, from the later decades of the
eighteenth century to the 1830s, Romanian leaders relied on a single patron,
Russia, whose policies had been the most effective in loosening the bonds of
Ottoman Turkish domination, but they were not prepared to accept a Russian
protectorate in its place.2 During the 1830s and 1840s, Russia dissipated the good
I
The most recent general history of the Romanians in English that emphasizes the period covered
in this essay is Vlad Georgescu, The Romanians: A History, Alexandra Bley-Vroman, trans. (Columbus,
Ohio, 1991).
2 A thorough, even-handed survey of Russo-Romanian relations is Barbara Jelavich, Russia and the
Formation of the Romanian National State, 1821-1878 (Cambridge, 1984). There is much on Russian
policy toward Moldavia and Wallachia and the Romanian reaction to it in Anastasie Iordache and
Apostol Stan, Apdrarea autonomiei Principatelor romdne, 1821-1859 (Bucharest, 1987).
1064
Romania 1065
will it had accumulated as the liberator of Orthodox Christians from Muslim rule
by its heavy-handed interference in Romanian internal affairs. The Russophobia
that afterward became a constant in Romanian foreign relations dates from this
period. It was soon reinforced in 1848 when a Russian army destroyed a fledgling
experiment in liberalism and independence in Wallachia.
Largely as a consequence of the Russian experience, Romanian politicians and
intellectuals sought to replace dependence on a single power by a collective
guarantee from all the powers. Their action represented a definitive shift in
foreign policy away from the East toward the West, especially toward France.
They also looked to the West to support their efforts to bring about the union of
Moldavia and Wallachia, which they judged an essential step toward full inde-
pendence. The crisis in international relations caused by the Crimean War gave
the Romanians the opportunity they -sought. In the Treaty of Paris of 1856, the
victors in effect abolished the Russian protectorate and established the mechanism
by which the Romanians themselves might have a voice in deciding their future
form of government. When the great powers rejected the union of Moldavia and
Wallachia, Romanian leaders, backed by a surge of public enthusiasm, brought
about de facto union in 1859 by electing the same man, Alexandru Cuza, prince
of each principality. Cuza himself completed the administrative union of the
principalities in 1861, and the powers acquiesced in what seemed an inevitable
sequence of events. It was through a similar combination of great-power bickering
and Romanian initiative that independence was secured in 1878 at the Congress
of Berlin and the Kingdom of Romania proclaimed and recognized in 1881.3 The
settlement of these matters left a residue of bitterness on the Romanian side, for
independence had been won at a high price. The Romanians had had to cede
southern Bessarabia to Russia, despite their claims that the tsar's ministers had
promised to respect the territorial integrity of their country. They had also been
forced by the Western powers to change the country's constitution in order to
allow Jews the opportunity to acquire full rights of citizenship.4
For the next three decades, until World War I, Romanian leaders abandoned
the policy of reliance on collective action by the great powers to promote national
interests. Their belief that their country had been ill-used by Russia and the other
powers during the Eastern crisis of 1875-1878 and their perception of the
international situation as uncertain and hostile to newly independent states
3The literature on the crucial period between the union of the principalities and independence
is abundant. Thad W. Riker, The Making of Roumania: A Study of an International Problem, 1856-1866
(London, 1931), remains a fundamental account of the policies of the great powers. A recent critical
investigation of relations between the powers and Romania from a Romanian perspective is
Gheorghe Cliveti, Romania i puterile garante 1856-1878 Jassy, 1988). Indispensable for many aspects
of nation-building is Lothar Maier, Rumainien auf dem Weg zur UnabhMngigkeitserkldrung, 1866-1877
(Munich, 1989). As for Russo-Romanian relations between 1875 and 1878 and, in particular, the
dispute over southern Bessarabia, an able presentation of Russian objectives is Mikhail Zalyshkin,
Vneshniaia politika Rumynii i rumyno-russkie otnosheniia, 1875-1878 (Moscow, 1974). Gheorghe I.
Bratianu, Le probleme desfronti0res russo-roumaines pendant la guerre de 1877-1878 et au
Congros
de Berlin
(Bucharest, 1928), analyzes Romanian policy.
4
The literature on the Jews of Romania during the period is lacking in impartiality. Hostility to
Jews is manifested in such works as Verax [Radu D. Rosetti], La Roumanie et lesJuifs (Bucharest, 1903).
Anti-Semitism is denounced in Carol Iancu, Les Juifs en Roumanie, 1866-1919: De l'exclusion a
l'imancipation (Aix-en-Provence, 1978).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
1066 Keith Hitchins
persuaded them to bind their country to powerful allies. King Charles I and his
prime minister therefore agreed to join the Triple Alliance in 1883, which they
judged to be the most powerful bloc of states on the Continent. This commitment
served as the foundation of Romania's foreign policy until 1914, despite a
manifest sympathy for France among both politicians and the general public.5
With the achievement of independence, Romanian leaders could pursue more
aggressively another significant task of nation-building-the joining to the king-
dom of the some 2,800,000 Romanians in Hungary (the historical principality of
Transylvania and the adjoining Banat,
Cripana,
and Maramures regions), the
230,000 in Austria (Bukovina), and the 1,000,000 in Russia (Bessarabia). Al-
though Romanian governments between the 1890s and World War I were
circumspect in handling the nationality problem in their two powerful neighbors,
the rising level of irredentist sentiments at home was a constant reminder of how
fragile the partnership with Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance had become
and how slight the sympathy for Russia remained.
Of the three communities, the Romanians of Bukovina and Bessarabia were
perhaps the least fortunate. Cut off abruptly from their Moldavian homeland (the
former when Austria occupied northern Moldavia in 1774 and the latter when
Russia annexed that part of Moldavia between the Prut and Dniester rivers in
1812), they were subject almost at once to centralization. They could not
participate in politics as distinct ethnic communities, and their cultural life was
under constant pressure from unsympathetic bureaucracies. Yet a national
consciousness, at least among the educated, remained alive and manifested itself
vigorously in 1917 and 1918.6
The Romanians of Transylvania made the strongest defense of nationality.7
Their political leaders formed the Romanian National Party in 1881 to coordinate
the preservation of political and cultural autonomy in the face of efforts by
successive Hungarian governments to assimilate the non-Magyar nationalities.
5On Romania's relations with Germany and Austria-Hungary, Ernst Ebel, Rumdnien und die
Mittelmachte (Berlin, 1939), retains its value as a survey based on published diplomatic sources. It may
be supplemented by Gheorghe Nicolae Cazan and
$erban
Radulescu-Zoner, Rumanien und der
Dreibund, 1878-1914 (Bucharest, 1983). Uta Bindreiter, Die diplomatischen und wirtschaftlichen Bezie-
hungen zwischen Osterreich-Ungarn und Rumanien in denJahren 1875-88 (Vienna, 1976), traces the links
between trade, politics, and nationalism in Austro-Hungarian-Romanian relations. Relatively little
has been published on Romania's relations with France during the period. Vasile Vesa, Les relations
politiques
roumano-franvaises
au debut du XXe siecle (1900-1916) (Bucharest, 1986), is a useful
introduction devoted mainly to the period of the war.
6 The writing of up-to-date, impartial, and comprehensive histories of the Romanians of each
province is a pressing task for scholars. On Bukovina, one may consult Erich Prokopowitsch, Die
rumanische Nationalbewegung in der Bukowina und der Dako-romanismus (Graz, 1965). On Bessarabia,
there is Istoriia Moldavskoi SSR, vol. 1 (Kishinev, 1965), which ignores Moldavian (that is, Romanian)
political and intellectual movements and treats the Moldavians as part of the broader Russian society.
The standard Romanian work remains Ion Nistor, Istoria Basarabiei: Scriere de popularizare (Cernauti,
1923).
7
The most recent of numerous surveys of the controversial nationality problem in Transylvania
before World War I are
5tefan
Pascu, Fdurirea statului national unitar romdn 1918, vol. 1 (Bucharest,
1983), which sets forth a Romanian viewpoint, and Bela Kopeczi, ed., Erdely toirtgnete, vol. 3 (1830-t61
napjainkig) (Budapest, 1986), which presents the Romanian national movement within the context of
Transylvania as a part of Hungary. Of particular value is Cornelia Bodea and Hugh Seton-Watson,
eds., R. W. Seton-Watson and the Romanians, 1906-1 920, 2 vols. (Bucharest, 1988), which contains the
correspondence and other writings of the famous journalist and historian.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
Romania 1067
Largely as a consequence of these actions, the idea that Romanians and Magyars
were natural allies destined to stand together "in a sea of Slavs and Germans" gave
way to bitterness and intransigence. The Romanians were sustained by a new idea
of nation that justified self-determination. Formulated in the 1890s by Aurel C.
Popovici, a leading advocate of the federalization of the Habsburg Monarchy and
much influenced by Social Darwinism, it likened the ethnic nation to a living
organism endowed by nature with a right to develop in accordance with its unique
attributes.8 Iuliu Maniu, on behalf of the Romanian National Party, took the idea
of nation further by insisting that it knew no political boundaries and had united
Romanians everywhere in a struggle to achieve national fulfillment.9 It was a view
shared by many intellectuals and politicians in the Romanian kingdom. Inevitably,
Romanian aspirations to self-determination could not be reconciled with the
determination of Hungarian political leaders to transform multinational Hungary
into a Magyar national state. Negotiations between 1910 and 1914 to effect a
compromise failed, for by then both sides were certain that national survival itself
was at stake.'0
Greater Romania came into being primarily in response to specific conditions
prevailing in each of the territories inhabited by Romanians, rather than by
successes on the battlefield. (Romania had entered World War I in 1916 on the
Allied side in order to gain Transylvania and Bukovina, but German and
Austro-Hungarian armies had prevailed.) First in Bessarabia in 1917 and 1918 as
a result of the chaos created by the Russian Revolution and then in Transylvania
and Bukovina as Austria-Hungary disintegrated, Romanian political leaders
rallied public opinion to demand union with Romania and called for the
Romanian army to support them. The resulting territorial acquisitions more than
doubled the size of the country to 296,000 square kilometers and increased the
population from 8,500,000 to over 16,000,000. The acquisitions were sanctioned,
though not without rancor, by the major Allied powers in the peace treaties of
1919 and 1920.11 The great majority of Romanians were now included within the
new borders (only some 600,000 remained outside). Territorially, the nation-state
had thus become a reality.
An essential aspect of nation-building was the creation of new political institu-
tions. The general tendency between the early decades of the nineteenth century
and the 1930s was toward rationalization in administration and an alignment of
government as a whole with Western models.'2 In the 1830s, the Organic Statutes,
8
Aurel C. Popovici, Principiul de nafionalitate (Bucharest, 1894), 21.
9
Iuliu Maniu, Discursuri parlamentare (Blaj, 1906), 76-77.
10
Keith Hitchins, "The Nationality Problem in Hungary: Istvin Tisza and the Rumanian National
Party, 1910-1914," Journal of Modern
History,
53 (December 1981): 619-5 1.
11
The often bitter relations between Romania and the Big Four at Versailles are discussed by
Sherman D. Spector, Rumania at the Paris Peace Conference: A Study of the
Diplomacy of Ioan I. C. Brdtianu
(New York, 1962).
12 The most extensive survey of Romanian parliamentary institutions and activity between the
1830s and 1918 is Paraschiva Cincea, Mircea losa, and Apostol Stan, eds., Istoria parlamentului i a
viefri
parlamentare
din Romania ptnd la 1918 (Bucharest, 1983). Indispensable for Romanian thought
on constitutional theory and practice is the collection of essays written by leading public figures
during the drafting of the Constitution of 1923 and published by Institutul Social Roman, Noua
Constitufie a Romdniei Ei nouile constitulii europene (Bucharest, 1923). Solid studies of political parties
before World War I are Apostol Stan, Grupdri fi curente politice fn Romdnia a^ntre unire {i independenpi
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
1068 Keith Hitchins
in effect constitutions, one each for Moldavia and Wallachia, laid solid founda-
tions for systematic government and confirmed the principle of representation in
a legislative assembly, at least for the upper classes. During the springtime of
peoples in 1848, Moldavian and Wallachian revolutionaries drafted constitutions
guaranteeing citizens fundamental political and civil rights and expanding their
participation in public affairs. Although the liberal government established to
bring these principles to fruition in Wallachia was short-lived, just two decades
later they were embodied in a new fundamental law, the Constitution of 1866,
which provided a stable framework for the development of political life until the
eve of World War II. The accession of the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen dynasty,
also in 1866, enhanced political stability by providing firm direction for both
internal and foreign policy. Then, in the following decade, disparate political
groupings coalesced into the two main parties-the National Liberal and the
Conservative-which infused life into the parliamentary institutions outlined in
the constitution. After World War I, political structures were adapted to the needs
of the expanded nation-state in the Constitution of 1923. But the expectations of
political continuity proved illusory as a drift toward authoritarian government
gained momentum in the 1930s. The inabilities of parliamentary government and
of traditional political parties to deal with the world economic depression and
other crises have often been cited as causes of the weakening of democracy. But
many critics also detected a fatal flaw in the political structure itself-the
middle-class character of the constitutions of 1866 and 1923, which had been
drawn up for a country in which the middle class constituted only a narrow
stratum of the population. As a consequence, critics pointed out, the operation of
sophisticated political machinery lay not with an enlightened and experienced
citizenry but was left to a small circle of professional politicians and a peasant
majority lacking in education and experience whom the politicians could manip-
ulate at will.
POLITICIANS AND INTELLECTUALS beginning in the later decades of the nineteenth
century undertook another essential task of nation-building-the transformation
of an overwhelmingly agricultural economy into one based on industry and the
city.13 The results were mixed. Agriculture remained the foundation of the
(1859-1877) (Bucharest, 1979); and Ion Bulei, Sistemul politic al Romaeniei moderne: Partidul Conservator
(Bucharest, 1987). Of great value in assessing political programs and ideologies in the interwar
period are the essays in Institutul Social Roman, Doctrinele partidelor politice (Bucharest, 1923). The
drift toward authoritarianism in the 1930s is amply covered in Armin Heinen, Die Legion "Erzengel
Michael" in Rumainien: Soziale Bewegung und politische Organisation (Munich, 1986), now the standard
work on the Iron Guard. Also valuable on the nature of the Iron Guard is Eugen Weber, "Romania,"
in Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, eds., The European Right: A Historical Profile (Berkeley, Calif.,
1965), 501-74.
13 An indispensable guide to Romania's economic development in the interwar period is Henry L.
Roberts, Rumania: Political Problems of an Agrarian State (New Haven, Conn., 1951). David Turnock,
The Romanian Economy in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1986), provides up-to-date details. Essential
reading is Virgil Madgearu, Evolu4ia economiei romdneti dupd rdzboiul mondial (Bucharest, 1940), an
exhaustive survey of all the major branches of the Romanian interwar economy by a master economic
thinker and a leading figure in the Peasantist movement. On agriculture and agrarian reform and its
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
Romania 1069
economy until World War II. It provided the bulk of the national income and the
primary means of livelihood for almost 80 percent of the population. Striking,
too, was the persistence of tradition. The organization of agriculture changed but
little after the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Its characteristic feature
remained "peasant agriculture," a system of production carried on by individual
peasant families on small holdings. On the whole, it was primitive in technology
and methods and burdened by overpopulation and debt, conditions perpetuated
in large measure by a concentration on the production of grain for export. Not
even the extensive land reforms of the 1920s significantly altered the traditional
patterns of production, despite clear evidence that they impeded progress. The
reforms that governments did introduce in the interwar period, such as support
for cooperatives, an expansion of rural credit, and the promotion of industrial
crops, benefited almost exclusively the relatively small number of prosperous
peasants.
Industry from the 1890s on experienced steady growth. Output in some
branches, such as oil, metallurgy, and chemicals, was impressive. The driving
force behind industrialization was a small industrial and banking elite with close
links to major political parties, especially the National Liberals, who had made the
creation of a modern industry their primary economic goal in nation-building.
Characteristic of the interwar period was the increasing intervention of the state
to accelerate economic growth in general and promote industry in particular.
Although it respected private ownership and allowed private capital numerous
advantages, the government arrogated to itself the role of planning and super-
vising what came to be called the "national economy." The state, in effect,
assumed the economic functions that the middle class had exercised in Western
Europe during the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the development of industry
was uneven. Significant gaps remained: for example, industry could not produce
all the machines it needed for its own continued growth, and in technology the
majority of its plants remained behind those of the West. Another persistent
obstacle to the development of industry was the inability of the domestic market
to absorb its products because of the low standard of living and the consequent
diminished purchasing power of the majority of the population. Thus industrial
growth in many sectors depended more on state support than on consumer
demand.
Romanian nation-building not only touched political and economic structures
but also involved the integration of minorities and the dispossessed majority, the
peasantry, into the general social fabric. Little progress was made in the interwar
period. Problems of social integration had been aggravated by the acquisition of
new territories at the end of World War I because with them came substantial
minorities. In 1920, approximately 30 percent of the population was ethnically
consequences, the fullest account in English remains David Mitrany, The Land and the Peasant in
Rumania: The War and Agrarian Reform (1917-21) (London, 1930). It may be supplemented by D.
~andru,
Reforma agrard din 1921 an Romania (Bucharest, 1975); and Vasile Bozga, Criza agrard in
Romdnia dintre cele doud rdzboaie mondiale (Bucharest, 1975). Marcela Felicia lovanelli, Industria
romdneascd, 1934-1938 (Bucharest, 1975), describes the successes and shortcomings of industrializa-
tion and the limits of state intervention.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
1070 Keith Hitchins
non-Romanian compared to 8 percent before the war. The Hungarians of
Transylvania, who composed 29 percent of the population of the historical
principality, strove to maintain a separate political and cultural identity in Greater
Romania and resisted integration into the broader Romanian society. For their
part, the Romanian government and Romanian nationalist organizations, ever
wary of irredentism, rejected Hungarian claims to autonomy.14 The Jews of
Greater Romania, some 730,000, or 4 percent of the total population in 1930, had
traditionally been treated as foreigners and in the 1930s had to confront virulent
forms of anti-Semitism and government-sponsored discrimination.15 The major-
ity of peasants also fell into the category of outsiders. Dependent on the yields of
inadequate holdings, they led a substandard existence characterized by inade-
quate diet, rudimentary housing, and poor or nonexistent health care. Govern-
ment programs brought only slight improvements in their condition.16
A fundamental component of nation-building was the Romanians' growing
relationship with Western Europe. 17 Economic contacts were of paramount
importance initially in drawing Romania out of the relative isolation imposed by
Ottoman suzerainty. Relations grew steadily after the Treaty of Adrianople of
1829 between Russia and the Ottoman empire, in which the Ottomans renounced
their centuries-old commercial monopoly over Moldavia and Wallachia and
thereby opened the principalities' markets and raw materials to international
trade. Exchanges between Romania and Western Europe (including Austria-
Hungary and Germany) expanded dramatically between the 1870s and World
War I, when Romanian exports tripled and imports quadrupled, clear evidence of
Romania's integration into the international economic system. The same dynamic
rhythm of trade with Western Europe continued in the interwar period. Roma-
nia's exports on the whole were those of a predominantly agricultural country-
grain, animals, and lumber, which along with oil constituted over 85 percent of
total exports in 1937. Manufactured goods and machinery made up the bulk of
imports, but in the 1930s significant changes occurred in the general pattern. The
share of semi-processed goods and raw materials increased, because of progress
14
Works on the Hungarians of Transylvania in the interwar period are abundant but are almost
all polemical. Imre Mik6, Huszonket ev: Az Erdelyi
Magyarsag
politikai toirtenete 1918. December I -to1 1940.
Augusztus 30-ig. (Budapest, 1941), is a detailed and sympathetic survey of their political organization
and objectives. The Romanian point of view is sustained by Silviu Dragomir, La Transylvanie roumaine
et ses minorite's ethniques (Bucharest, 1934).
15 An impartial monograph on the Jews of Romania in the interwar period has yet to be written.
Representative of-- much anti-Jewish writing is Anastase N. Haciu, Evreii an Tdrile Romanneti
(Bucharest, 1943). An indictment of anti-Semitism by a leader of the Jewish community is W.
Filderman, Adevdrul asupra problemei evree,ti din Romdnia (Bucharest, 1925).
16 An indispensable introduction to almost every aspect of the peasant condition, except religion,
is D.
5andru,
Populatia rurald a Romdniei antre cele doud rdzboaie mondiale (Jassy, 1980).
17 On economic relations with Western Europe, I. Puia, Relatiile economice externe ale Ronauniei an
perioada interbelica (Bucharest, 1982), provides the necessary data within the general context of
economic development. Maurice Pearton, Oil and the Romanian State (Oxford, 1971), describes the
Western presence in the oil industry; and
Constanta
Bogdan and Adrian Platon, Capitalul strdin an
societdfile anonime din Romdnia an perioada interbelicd (Bucharest, 1981), make a minute investigation of
the size and effects of foreign investments in Romanian industry, especially 1934-1938. On Western
European influence on Romanian political institutions, see Alexandre Tilman-Timon, Les
influences
etrangeres sur le droit constitutionel roumain (Paris, 1946).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
Romania 1071
in industrialization and the growing capacity of domestic industry to satisfy
consumer demand.
The role of the West in the growth of Romanian industry was mixed. By
exporting massive quantities of processed goods to Romania, it hastened the
demise of traditional artisan crafts in the nineteenth century and retarded the
development of a modern industry. But, at the same time, the transfer of
technology and substantial investments of capital spurred industrialization.
Large-scale investments began after Romania achieved independence in 1878,
and by World War I foreign capital had become predominant in numerous
industries, especially oil, gas and electricity, metallurgy, and chemicals. Foreign
capital retained a significant share of industry in the interwar period, but by 1938
the Romanian industrial and financial elite had increased its own capital holdings
in industry overall to about 60 percent.
Romania's economic relationship with Western Europe was clearly one of
dependence. Essential to the country's well-being was the sale of large quantities
of agricultural products and other raw materials. Thus the loss of international
markets during the depression of the early 1930s, for instance, brought severe
economic hardship at home. Dependence on exports discouraged reforms in
agriculture because it tended to reinforce the traditional structures of inefficient,
peasant agriculture. As for industry, although Romanian industrialists and
bankers, aided by the National Liberal Party, tried to extend their control over the
national economy by limiting the participation of foreign capital, Romania
continued to be a large importer of capital and thus remained dependent on
Western investments to propel the economy forward.
Western Europe also exerted a decisive influence on Romanian political
institutions. Beginning in the 1830s, the Romanian intellectual and political elite
traveled regularly to the West, mainly to France and Germany, for higher
education. For a century, they drew inspiration and ideas directly or indirectly
from all the ideologies current in Europe, from Romanticism and liberalism to the
various strains of nationalism and conservatism. In institution-building, too, the
West stood as the example: the Constitution of 1866 was modeled on the Belgian
constitution of 1831, the main codes of law were inspired by French codes, and
parliamentary structures drew heavily on Western experience.
THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC COURSE ON WHICH ROMANIA EMBARKED in the 1830s
almost immediately provoked controversy among Romanian intellectuals. Their
concern centered on the massive intrusion of Western Europe into Romanian
society, a process that compelled them to confront fundamental questions of who
they were as Romanians and what path of development was best suited to the
national genius. As the debate intensified, two general currents of ideas became
discernible, one that held Romania to be a part of Europe and thus destined to
develop economically and socially in ways similar to the urbanized and industri-
alized West and the other that emphasized the country's inherent agrarian
character and the consequent need to cleave to tradition.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
1072 Keith Hitchins
In the course of a century, until World War II, both the "traditionalists" and the
"Europeanists," as adherents of the two currents came to be called, displayed a
remarkable continuity of thought. 18 The traditionalists insisted that Romania had
always been and would remain a predominantly agricultural country. They
focused their attention on the small peasant producer as the pillar of a vital
economic and social order, and they extolled the village as the preserver of
"healthy" tradition and "authentic" national values. Thus certain that Western
Europe, urbanized and industrialized, could never serve Romania as a model of
development, they decried the turn their country had taken in the nineteenth
century when it adopted "wholesale" Western political and economic institutions.
The Europeanists came to strikingly different conclusions. They had no doubt
whatever that Romania was a part of Europe and would inevitably follow the same
course of development as the West. They insisted that Romania had taken the
right path in the nineteenth century by opening the doors wide to European ideas
and institutions, and they predicted that their country would become more urban
and more industrial and that the middle class would grow and rightfully assume
leadership in a modern nation-state.
The first systematic criticism of the direction that modern Romania had taken
came from a group of young intellectuals who in the 1860s and later argued that
their country had entered the European economic and cultural world too
precipitously, borrowing and imitating without regard for indigenous customs
and experience. Known as Junimists (from junime, youth), they argued that such
contact with Europe had been harmful precisely because it had touched only the
surface of Romanian society.19 Much indebted to European historicist and
evolutionist thought, they perceived in recent Romanian history a fateful devia-
tion from the principles of organic social development that had led to a
"paralyzing antinomy" between the form and substance of Romania's institutions.
Titu Maiorescu (1840-1917), the leading theorist of Junimism, put the matter in
stark terms: in appearance, the Romanians had acquired almost the whole of
Western civilization, but in reality their politics, science, and literature had been
stillborn, "phantoms without bodies" and "forms without substance."20 He dis-
covered a fundamental incongruity between the institutions and the social
structure of contemporary Romania. In his view, there were only two classes in
Romanian society-landlords and peasants-but the political and economic forms
borrowed from the West were the products of profound changes that had
brought the bourgeoisie to power. Yet, he claimed, Romania had no bourgeoisie,
and hence its political and economic structures lacked substance. Although
Maiorescu and other Junimists were eager to move their country toward a
modern civilization patterned on the Western model, they were certain that they
18
Discussions of the main issues dividing traditionalists and Europeanists are to be found in
Kenneth Jowitt, ed., Social Change in Romania, 1860-1940: A Debate on Development in a European
Nation (Berkeley, Calif., 1978); and Z. Ornea, Traditionalism Xi modernitate in deceniul al treilea
(Bucharest, 1980).
19 The most complete account of Junimism from a sociological perspective is Z. Ornea, Junimea Xi
junimismul
(Bucharest, 1975).
20 Titu Maiorescu, "in contra directiunii de astazi a culturei romane," Convorbiri Literare, 2
(December 1, 1868): 305-06.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
Romania 1073
could accomplish their goal without changing traditional social and economic
structures, since they foresaw the continued predominance of agriculture in the
economy and society and dismissed industry as merely the artificial creation of
foreigners and foreign capital.
Arguments similar to those of the Junimists in their analysis of nineteenth-
century Romania formed the core of all subsequent traditionalist theories of
nationhood and development. At the turn of the century, burgeoning agrarianist
writers were the most fervent promoters of traditionalism. The Samanatorists
(from samanator, sower) insisted that Romania had been diverted onto a "false
path" in the early nineteenth century by politicians and intellectuals who had
abruptly broken with the country's agrarian past.21 They discovered in such a
thoughtless act the underlying cause of all the contradictions in contemporary
Romanian society. Their principal spokesman, historian Nicolae lorga (1871-
1940), vehemently denounced capitalism as an "unnatural implantation" into an
agrarian society that lived by economic and social laws of its own. For him, the
great city was the symbol of everything that had gone awry in the evolution of
nineteenth-century Romania. It was the place where capitalist industry and
commerce flourished and where the new social and economic order that was
undermining traditional society drew its nourishment. He found the whole
process by which modern Romania had come into being artificial, an "exercise in
ideology" imposed on a people who until then had followed a "natural, organic
evolution."
Sharing a similar vision of an agrarian Romania and dismay at the course of
development it had taken were the Poporanists (or Populists, from popor,
people).22 Their leading theorist, the lawyer and journalist Constantin Stere
(1865-1936), praised rural civilization as organic and authentic and rejected
urban civilization as an import and hence inorganic. A rural life, he insisted, was
the only social and political form for Romania; the peasant was the "whole man"
and the village the only place where he could flourish. Aware of the peril that
Western capitalism and industry posed for an agrarian society, Stere was
nonetheless certain that an economic and social system based on small-scale
peasant agriculture and operating in accordance with categories and values of its
own could withstand the onslaught.23
In the two decades after World War I, the traditionalists drew sustenance from
general European currents of thought opposed to rationalism and scientific
positivism. They turned for guidance to, among others, Nietzsche, whose anti-
rationalism fascinated them, and Spengler, whose theories about the inevitable
decline of civilizations, notably the West, provided them with welcome analytical
tools. Strikingly new in their own thought was an emphasis on Eastern Orthodox
spirituality as the essential component of Romanian ethnic consciousness. They
discerned in Orthodoxy the primary support of the organic way of life preserved
in the Romanian village. This fusion of Eastern Christianity and the folk tradition
21
Z. Ornea, Sdmdnatorismul, 2d edn. (Bucharest, 1971), is comprehensive and critical.
22
The most extensive study is Z. Ornea, Poporanismul (Bucharest, 1972).
23
Constantin Stere, "Social-democratism sau poporanism?" Viafa Romc2neascd, 2 (September 1,
1907): 327-34; (October 1, 1907): 17-18; 3 (April 1, 1908): 59-60.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
1074 Keith Hitchins
laid the foundations of Orthodoxism, a characteristic expression of Romanian
identity in the interwar period.24
The founder of Orthodoxism was theologian and journalist Nichifor Crainic
(1889-1972). He insisted that the sources of Romanian spirituality, and hence the
element that defined the Romanian national character and had determined the
evolution of Romanian society until the nineteenth century, had originated in
Byzantium. Thus he showed no hesitation in placing the Romanians squarely in
the East. But his reverence for the East was balanced by a total rejection of the
West; he found every aspect of modern Western society and thought incompat-
ible with the national character. Proclaiming the differences between the Ortho-
dox East and the Roman Catholic and Protestant West "insurmountable" and
"eternal," like traditionalists before him, he blamed the liberals of 1848 and the
authors of the Constitution of 1866 for having forced Western ideas and
institutions on a society structurally incapable of assimilating them.
Crainic found a theoretical justification for his hostility to the West in the
antinomy "civilization" and "culture." Borrowing extensively from Spengler, he
adopted the thesis that the West (civilization), because of its embrace of science
and materialism, had entered the period of old age and decline. He identified the
distinctive sign of its crisis as the "world city," Berlin or New York, "centers of
death," an environment of "unrelieved materialism" and "colorless internation-
alism" that deprived people of a creative sense, leaving them sterile, "without
metaphysics."25 Crainic complained that Romanian liberals had introduced the
spirit of the modern city into the world of the patriarchal Romanian village and
had imposed a polished civilization dominated by scientific positivism on a culture
of "primitive youth," delicate and almost childlike in its feelings, whose means of
expression was religion. The results, he lamented, were everywhere to be seen in
the "chaos" of contemporary Romanian society, and he could foresee no other
salvation for the Romanians except a return to the "native genius" and the
"autochthonous spirit," that is, a revitalization of spiritual life based on the
Eastern tradition.
Allied spiritually to Crainic was Nae Ionescu (1888-1940), a professor of
philosophy at the University of Bucharest and the chief theorist of trairism (from
trdire, living), the Romanian variant of existentialism. He stood in the forefront of
the anti-rationalist current in Romanian thought in the interwar period and
exerted a stunning influence on the generation of intellectuals who began their
careers in the 1920s, including Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran.26 Ionescu
proclaimed the bankruptcy of positivism and insisted that the world was guided
by forces intractable to man's cognitive powers. Life was a spontaneous gushing
forth of the human spirit that reason was powerless to contain. This certainty of
24
An extensive, though one-sided, account of Orthodoxism may be found in Dumitru Micu,
"Gindirea" ~i gandirismul (Bucharest, 1975). See Mac Linscott Ricketts, Mircea Eliade: The Romanian
Roots, 1907-1945, 2 vols. (Boulder, Colo., 1988), for a comprehensive introduction to the anti-
rationalist currents in Romanian intellectual life in the interwar period.
25
Nichifor Crainic, "Parsifal," Gandirea, 3 (January 20, 1924): 181-82.
26
For Ionescu's influence on the young generation of Romanian intellectuals, see Mircea Eliade's
comments in Nae Ionescu, Roza va'nturilor, 1926-1933 (Bucharest, 1937), 421-44; and Ricketts,
Mircea
Eliade,
1: 91-126.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
Romania 1075
the primacy of exuberant life over the intellect led Ionescu to religious faith. Only
the existence of God and his intervention in phenomena, he taught, relieved the
world of its character as an "absurd anarchy."
Ionescu found a refuge from the absurdities of contemporary society in the
Romanian village, for it was here that the soul prevailed over the mind and the
Romanian peasant stood in direct communion with the essential nature of things.
Orthodoxy, he thought, had been primarily responsible for shaping the attitude
of the peasant toward life and thus for creating a specifically Romanian view of
the world. Like Crainic, Ionescu traced the intimate relationship between Ortho-
doxy and the village back to the coming of Christianity to ancient Dacia in the first
century, and he judged the influence of Eastern Christianity to have been so
profound that it became a part of the Romanians' very being; or, as he put it, "we
are Orthodox because we are Romanian, and we are Romanian because we are
Orthodox.,"27
This blending of ethnicity and Eastern spirituality led Ionescu to conclude that
fundamental, unbridgeable structural differences separated the Romanians from
Western society. He found in Roman Catholic and Protestant Europe the stark
antithesis to Romanian peasant society; the West was individualist in social
relations, rationalist in intellectual preoccupations, and bourgeois-capitalist in
economic structures. He stridently denounced the institutions of bourgeois
Europe as artificial creations based on purely 'juridical" relationships between
groups and individuals. The institutions of the Romanian village, on the other
hand, he pronounced "organic" structures, which had preserved Romanians' easy
integration into nature and their community and had enhanced their receptivity
to the mystery of existence. Such qualities, Ionescu insisted, explained why
Romania could never become industrial: Romanians lacked the spirit of calcula-
tion and the discipline of work that were the foundations of modern, urban,
capitalist society.
Traditionalists of a different sort were the Peasantists
(TPrlnisti,
from taran,
peasant). They were concerned primarily with the material well-being of rural
society and stood for a Romania economically and politically in harmony with its
predominantly agrarian structures.28 Like the Poporanists, they held peasant
agriculture to be by its very nature noncapitalist, and they struggled to keep
capitalism from penetrating the organization of agriculture, out of fear that it
would destroy everything distinctive and genuine in the Romanian way of life.
But they also made original contributions to the debate about Romania's devel-
opment, notably the elaboration by economist Virgil Madgearu (1887-1940) of
the doctrine of agrarian Romania as a third world situated between the capitalist
West and the collectivist East (the Soviet Union).29
Madgearu's theory was based on the assumption that the peasant family
holding was a unique, noncapitalist mode of production and constituted the
27
Ionescu, Roza vanturilor, 205.
28
The best source for Peasantist economic and social doctrine is Virgil Madgearu, Agrarianism,
Capitalism, Imperialism (Bucharest, 1936). Z. Ornea, Tdrdnismul: Studiu sociologic (Bucharest, 1969), is
an ample survey intended to reveal the contradictions between Peasantist theory and the lamentable
reality of peasant agriculture.
29 Virgil Madgearu, "Teoria economiei
tArane?ti,"
Independenta Economica, 8 (1925): 1-20.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
1076 Keith Hitchins
foundation of Romania's national economy. In formulating it, he was indebted to
the Poporanists for fundamental ideas about the nature of peasant agriculture.
But he also drew extensively on the writings of Russian agricultural economist
Aleksandr Chaianov, especially Die Lehre von der bauerlichen Wirtschaft,30 which
provided the theoretical foundation for Madgearu's analysis of the Romanian
family holding. He was attracted particularly to Chaianov's arguments about the
qualitative differences existing between peasant agriculture on the one hand and
the large-scale, capitalist agricultural enterprise on the other. Madgearu insisted
that peasant holdings, despite their technological inferiority to the large capitalist
farm, had not only not disappeared but had, in fact, become stronger. He
discerned the key to that strength in the special quality of the peasant holding-
production by the family. That economic activity, he maintained, was governed by
laws of its own, especially a different conception of gain and a different economic
psychology from those of the capitalist enterprise. He had to admit that capitalism
dominated the contemporary world economy; but beside it and separate from it,
he claimed, existed an agriculture with its own distinctive mode of production and
social organization.
In his last major work, Evolutia economiei
romanegti
dupa razboiul mondial (The
Evolution of the Romanian Economy after the World War),31 Madgearu could
discern no fundamental change in the structure of the Romanian economy in the
interwar period: the capitalist sector in general was still small; in his view,
capitalism as a mode of production had touched only a few branches of industry
in a significant way and agriculture maintained its predominance. He concluded
that there was still no possibility that the Romanian economy could be integrated
into the world capitalist system, for its structure continued to be determined by
several million peasant holdings, which formed an economic network governed
by values qualitatively different from those of a capitalist economy. Nonetheless,
he could not ignore the fact that Western capitalism exerted a powerful influence
over Romanian agriculture. Although he continued to deny that it had trans-
formed the mode of production of peasant holdings, he admitted that it had
penetrated the mechanism of distribution and, as a consequence, had subordi-
nated the "whole essence" of the peasant holding to the capitalist market.32
Madgearu displayed considerable reserve toward Western European political
institutions. As in economic development, he made a sharp distinction between
the Eastern and Western experience. This comparative approach persuaded him
that his brand of peasant democracy would in the long run prove superior to the
"bourgeois" form that had evolved in Western Europe. The economic crisis of the
early 1930s had crystallized his thought on the subject. Certain that the "bour-
geois-liberal social order" was in decline, he perceived as the main cause a striking
contradiction in Western society, exacerbated by the recent depression. He saw an
infrastructure based on economic and social inequality on the one hand and, on
the other, a democratic superstructure based on equality before the law and
30
A. V. Chaianov, Die Lehre von der biiuerlichen Wirtschaft: Versuch einer Theorie der Familienwirtschaft
im Landbau (Berlin, 1923).
31
(Bucharest, 1940).
32 Madgearu, Evolufia economiei romacnesti, 358.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
Romania 1077
universal suffrage. This contradiction, in his view, was inherent in bourgeois,
individualist democracy and therefore could never be resolved. Although he
remained committed to democracy, he was determined to avoid the "pitfalls" of its
Western form, which, he thought, came down to an exaggerated emphasis on
individual rights and an almost complete disregard of individual responsibilities
toward society. This style of democracy, which proclaimed liberty as an inalien-
able right but ignored the principles of equal opportunity and social justice, was
based, he concluded, on legal abstractions and had failed to keep pace with the
general evolution of society.33
THE EUROPEANISTS WERE AS DIVERSE in their assessments of Romania's evolution
as the traditionalists, but they shared a common conviction that its destiny lay with
Western Europe. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, the doctrine was
expressed by a number of economists who saw in industrialization the only means
of achieving economic and social progress and of overcoming the handicaps of
underdevelopment.
Not all Europeanists were capitalists. Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea (1855-
1920), the principal theorist of Romanian socialism, set forth similar views about
a Western path of development in such influential works as Neoiobagia (Neo-
serfdom) published in 1910.34 He argued that underdeveloped countries inevi-
tably came to be influenced by advanced nations, and, as a result, the social and
economic conditions prevailing in the advanced nations at any given time
determined the development of "backward countries." Pointing out that bour-
geois capitalism was the primary determinant of development in the modern age,
he showed how Romania's exchange relations with the West since the early
nineteenth century had "revolutionized" all its social, economic, and moral
relations and were relentlessly bringing the country into alignment with Western
Europe.35 The main task for socialists, he admonished, was to accelerate the
process by all possible means.
Two figures in Europeanism stand out: literary critic Eugen Lovinescu (1881-
1943) and economist and sociologist
$tefan
Zeletin (1882-1934). For the first time
in scholarly literature, they undertook a comprehensive investigation of the
causes that lay behind the development of modern Romania. They both linked
the process to the introduction of Western-style capitalism in the Romanian
principalities in the first half of the nineteenth century. But Lovinescu found the
motive force of change in ideas, whereas Zeletin emphasized economic and social
causes. Nonetheless, they agreed that "Westernization" was a necessary historical
stage through which every country was destined to pass, and they had no doubt
that outside European influences rather than internal forces had been the main
catalyst for the development of modern Romania.
33
Virgil Madgearu,
"Tendintele
de renovare ale
democratiei," Via4a Romdneascd, 27 (May-June
1935): 10-13.
34
A valuable introduction to Dobrogeanu-Gherea's career and thought is Damian Hurezeanu,
Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea: Studiu social-istoric (Bucharest, 1973).
35Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Opere complete, Ion
Popescu-Puturi, ed., 8 vols. (Bucharest,
1976-83), 38 (NeoiobMgia).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
1078 Keith Hitchins
In his influential investigation of the origins and development of modern
Romania, Istoria civilizatiei romane moderne (The History of Modern Romanian
Civilization),36 Eugen Lovinescu traced the origins of modern Romania back to
the early nineteenth century, to the beginnings of intense cultural contacts with
Western Europe. He thus treated the encounter as a contest between Western and
native systems of ideas. The West triumphed, Lovinescu argued, because the
Romanian elites judged Europe to be superior to the East. Consequently, these
elites undertook to close the enormous gap they perceived between themselves
and the West by adopting Western institutions, ethics, and practices, in accor-
dance with what Lovinescu called "synchronism." For him, this "law" was the key
to understanding the relationship between agricultural, patriarchal Romania on
the one hand and the industrial, urban West on the other. Accordingly, the
inferior imitated the superior-the underdeveloped nations copied the more
advanced, and the village the city. But, Lovinescu insisted, synchronism was not
simply imitation; it was also integration. He was certain that all Europe was
drawing closer together as a result of the expansion of modern means of
communication, and he pointed out that the most diverse societies were becoming
"homogenized" more rapidly than ever before. As an example, he cited the speed
with which a new art form became internationalized, how rapidly cubism or
expressionism spread across Europe. It was obvious, he thought, that Romania
could not help becoming a part of this integral, cosmopolitan civilization.37 He
assigned to the middle class the responsibility for accomplishing this task, since it
alone was capable of introducing all the elements of world civilization to the
Romanians and of overcoming the resistance of the "passive" and "inert" peasant
masses.
5tefan
Zeletin offered an economic interpretation of Romania's Europeaniza-
tion complementing Lovinescu's analysis of the cultural phases of the process.38
In his controversial investigation of the Romanian middle class, Burghezia romana:
Origina si rolul ei istoric (The Romanian Bourgeoisie: Its Origins and Historical
Role),39 he showed how modern Romania was the product of fundamental
economic changes caused by the introduction of Western capital in the first half
of the nineteenth century. Europeanization, in his view, had been rapid, and he
dated Romania's definitive entrance into the Western economic sphere from the
period immediately after the Crimean War. The inevitable consequence was an
economic revolution in which the old agrarian state slowly dissolved, the country
adapted itself to the demands of capitalism, and a bourgeoisie emerged to guide
it through all the successive stages of modernization. He could foresee no other
course for Romania; to remain a predominantly agricultural country struck him
as absurd and contrary to the laws of social evolution.
36
Eugen Lovinescu, Istoria civilizafiei romdne moderne, 3 vols. (Bucharest, 1924-26). Eugen Simion,
E. Lovinescu: Scepticul mantuit (Bucharest, 1971), treats Lovinescu's Europeanism as an expression of
his aesthetic values.
37
Lovinescu, Istoria civilizafiei romdne moderne, 3: 43-51, 63-103, 187-91.
38 In the absence of a monograph on Zeletin's career, one may consult Cezar Papacostea,
"5tefan
Zeletin: Insemnari privitoare la viata si opera lui," Revista de filosofie, 20 (July-September 1935):
201-62.
39
tefan Zeletin, Burghezia romaind: Origina si rolul ei istoric (Bucharest, 1925).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
Romania 1079
A short list of Europeanists would also include economist and politician Mihail
Manoilescu (1891-1950). Despite his repudiation of "old-style" liberalism and his
embrace of corporatism in the 1930s, he had no doubt that Romania would follow
the Western path of industrialization, which he saw as the only means of
surmounting economic backwardness and ending Romania's dependence on
Western Europe. He dismissed as fanciful the goal of the Poporanists and other
agrarianists to build a prosperous, modern economy based on agriculture. In his
major work on international economic relations, The'orie du protectionisme et de
l'echange international,40 he argued that industry enjoyed an intrinsic superiority
over agriculture. From his own analysis, he concluded that the productivity of
labor in industry was greater than in agriculture. He showed how the disparity in
value thus created accounted for the immense advantage in trade and the
economic and political dominance that Western Europe had gained over agricul-
tural Eastern Europe.41
Like Zeletin, Manoilescu accorded a key role to the bourgeoisie in the
development of capitalism in Romania in the nineteenth century. But he
discerned a growing crisis in the Romanian bourgeoisie and urged fundamental
changes in its structure if it was to fulfill its tasks in the twentieth century. He
pronounced the creative period of the old bourgeoisie, which had assumed
leadership of Romania's capitalist development after 1829 (his account of its
origins was essentially the same as Zeletin's), to be at an end and prophesied that
it faced a revolt of major proportions on the part of the mass of the population,
whom it had exploited mercilessly. In Rostul
?i
destinul burgheziei
romane?ti
(The
Role and Destiny of the Romanian Bourgeoisie),42 he argued that the bourgeoisie
must be "purified" through a complete reconstruction of its political, economic,
and social organization, a process he perceived already underway in Nazi
Germany and Fascist Italy. In Romania, too, he foresaw that the bourgeoisie
would continue to organize and direct the economy, but it would no longer be
burdened by the "dead weight" of capitalism and liberalism. Instead of remaining
dominant, it would be integrated into the state through a single, all-encompassing
political party, and its economic motivation would be "de-materialized" through
corporatism. As a result, the Romanian bourgeoisie would be composed of
persons eager to produce and to serve society as a whole, but it would remain a
bourgeoisie because the individual ownership of the means of production would
be maintained.43
THE EXPECTATIONS OF BOTH the Europeanists and the traditionalists were undone
by World War II and what followed, as Communism became the overwhelming
fact of life for Romanians in the second half of the twentieth century. For over
forty years, from the late 1940s until 1989, it served as the ideological cover for
40
Mihail Manoilescu, Theorie du protectionnisme et de l'echange international (Paris, 1929).
41
Mihail Manoilescu, "Le triangle economique et social des pays agricoles: La ville, le village,
l'etranger," Internationale Agrar Rundschau, 6 (June 1940): 16-26; Mihail Manoilescu, For4ele
nalionale
productive ,i comer4ul exterior (Bucharest, 1986), introduction, 26-28.
42
Mihail Manoilescu, Rostul ,i destinul burgheziei romacne,ti (Bucharest, 1942).
43
Manoilescu, Rostul ,i destinul burgheziei romacne,ti, 322-48, 380-98.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
1080 Keith Hitchins
a political and economic system that turned Romania away from Western Europe
toward the East. But Communism was not a robust indigenous growth. In the
interwar period, it had struck but shallow roots in Romanian society and
remained on the periphery of political life. Communism's lack of success had been
partly owing to relentless pursuit by the authorities, including its outlawing in
1924, which drove it underground and kept membership small (the high point
was about 5,000 members in 1936). Yet the economic and social structure of
interwar Romania also set formidable obstacles in the way of a collectivist,
internationalist movement represented by the Romanian Communist Party. The
aspirations of the peasants for land of their own, their devotion to religion, even
if only formal in many cases, and their respect for tradition made recruitment in
the countryside difficult for the Communist Party. Moreover, the mental climate
of the village persuaded many party leaders that the peasant was conservative by
nature and unlikely to be moved by their vision of the new proletarian order.
Thus Communists neglected the village, even the agricultural proletariat, which
represented a potentially strong constituency. The relatively modest level of
industrialization and urbanization kept the factory working class, the party's
preferred constituency, small in number. Here, too, the influence of the village
persisted, for the main source of urban labor was the countryside, where class
consciousness was little developed. The Communist Party also had to combat a
deep sense of patriotism in both the city and the village. Patriotism had been
strengthened by the creation of Greater Romania in 1918, and it cut across class
lines, causing Communist appeals to international proletarian solidarity and
friendship with the Soviet Union to fall on deaf ears. Reduced to perhaps a few
hundred members during World War 11, the Communist Party became a
significant and then dominant force only after the war through the support of
Soviet occupation authorities and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
This is not the place to describe Communist rule.44 Nor can its effects on the
long-term development of Romania be fully measured without greater historical
perspective. In time, the period may be judged an aberration that diverted
Romania from the Europeanizing course it had taken in the early nineteenth
century. But historians will undoubtedly point to those aspects of development in
the Communist period that suggest continuity with the interwar years. They may
note, for example, similar strivings to industrialize and to attain economic
independence from Western Europe (and after 1960 from the Soviet Union) and
may cite the role of the state as economic coordinator. There will be those, too,
who will see Communist rule as having contributed to the century-long process of
modernization through forced industrialization, the reordering of agriculture
and rural society, and the introduction of extensive collective social benefits. Yet,
44Of the numerous works in English on the Communist period, a short list would include Kenneth
Jowitt, Revolutionary Breakthroughs and National Development: The Case of Romania, 1944-1965 (Berke-
ley, Calif., 1971), a penetrating analysis of the policies carried out by the Communist Party to
transform Romanian society; Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism: Identity and Cultural
Politics in Ceausescu's Romania (Berkeley, 1991), an important contribution to the study of the idea of
nation and of mentalities in contemporary Romania; John Michael Montias, Economic Development in
Communist Rumania (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), a comprehensive investigation and critical evaluation
of Communist Party economic policies; and the useful survey by Michael Shafir, Romania: Politics,
Economics and Society; Political Stagnation and Simulated Change (Boulder, Colo., 1985).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
Romania 1081
whatever the judgment of historians may be in the future, it is evident now that
the overall experience of Communism for Romanians was traumatic. In the
economy, it substituted central control for the entrepreneurial spirit; in political
and social life, it submerged civil society in institutions lacking integrity; in
intellectual life, it stifled the free expression of the human spirit; and, gravest of
all, it did incalculable injury to the collective moral sense by proliferating laws and
disdaining Law.
To interpret the past and to analyze nation-building under such circumstances
offered intellectuals a challenge far more formidable than that faced by their
predecessors. History as a pure science that was disengaged from patriotism and
ideology had rarely been practiced before World War II, but then, at least,
historians and social thinkers had been free to pursue truth as they thought best
and to confront ideas in open forums. By contrast, during the Communist period,
the humanities and social sciences were subordinated to party interests, and
intellectuals were mobilized to add their skills to the building of the new,
collectivist order.
Nonetheless, the controls that historians and others had to endure were far
from uniform during the Communist period.45 Nor, after the early 1960s, can
one speak of a "united front" of historians and social scientists engaged in
fulfilling a single research agenda imposed from above. Rather, history and social
thought between 1947 and 1989 evolved in three broad stages. The first was the
period of mobilization, lasting until about 1960, and was characterized by a more
or less strict adherence to the tenets of Marxism-Leninism, as interpreted by the
party, and a general uniformity of views about Romania's past. The second
period, between the early 1960s and 1971, was one of relaxation corresponding to
the modest trend of liberalization in cultural life and a slight softening of political
and economic rigidity. It allowed historical inquiry and discussion to diversify and
flourish in ways unknown during the previous twenty years. Then, in 1971, the
situation changed dramatically when Nicolae
Ceau?escu
demanded a return to
strict ideological conformity in the humanities and social sciences. At the same
time, his so-called July theses signaled the beginning of party-sponsored nation-
alism in historiography, which soon became interwoven with an oppressive cult of
personality unique in modern Romanian history.
These political and ideological shifts were reflected in changing conceptions of
nation-building, which continued to be the primary object of historical investiga-
tion and analysis. In general, the treatment historians and others accorded
nation-building moved from an internationalist or proletarian interpretation in
the 1950s to a nationalist or patriotic stance in the 1980s. This evolution is
particularly evident in evaluations of internal and external influences on the
process. At first, Russia was praised as the chief contributor to the formation of
modern Romania, and matters of discord such as Bessarabia were passed over in
silence. Much was made also of the role Russian revolutionaries played in creating
the Romanian socialist movement,46 and the Bolshevik Revolution was pro-
45Viad Georgescu, Politica
?i
istorie: Cazul comunitilor romani, 1944-1977 (Munich, 1981), 11-75.
46
Gheorghe Haupt, Din istoricul leg4turilor revolulionare
rommno-ruse, 1849-1881 (Bucharest, 1955).
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
1082 Keith Hitchins
claimed a turning point in Romanian history.47 Soviet-Romanian friendship and
cooperation were hailed as eternal. By contrast, Romania's relations with Western
Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were described in somber terms
and judged to have had solely negative consequences. Yet the inevitability of
Romania's entrance into the world capitalist system was grudgingly acknowl-
edged. In the 1960s, the attitude toward Russia and the Soviet Union changed:
the existence of a Bessarabian problem was recognized, and Marx's own writings
were used to prove Russia's persistent hostility to the modern Romanian state.48
This trend in historiography continued in the 1970s and 1980s, as anti-Russian
and anti-Soviet sentiments mounted. At the same time, historians and social
thinkers reasserted Romania's traditional pre-war links to Europe. However, they
refrained from a wholehearted embrace of Europe, evincing instead the Roma-
nians' century-old ambivalence toward the West. On the one hand, they achieved
a certain balance in evaluating the respective contributions of East and West to the
creation of modern Romania, but, on the other, they emphasized "internal forces"
rather than "foreign influences" as the primary determinants of nation-building.
Many advocates of the new nativism joined together under the banner of
"protocronism," which came to the fore in the 1970s.49 The concept, which had
affinities to earlier traditionalist interpretations of national development and,
later, to Ceausescu's increasingly nationalist utterances, emphasized the unique
and pioneering character of Romanian culture.50 Its proponents, like the interwar
traditionalists, warned of the dire consequences of subordination to the West and
by implication denounced such cosmopolitan theories of development as Lovi-
nescu 's synchronism.51 These critical issues of Romania's place in Europe and the
viability of the Western model continued to absorb intellectuals in the 1980s and
were by no means resolved by the fall of the Ceausescu dictatorship.
Nation-building itself remains unfinished, as the post-1989 generation of
intellectuals grapples with fundamental aspects of the process. The boundaries of
Greater Romania must be reconstituted through the reintegration of Bessarabia
(now the Republic of Moldova) and northern Bukovina, which were lost to the
Soviet Union after World War II. The drafting of a new constitution and the
establishment of new political and economic institutions are again urgent tasks.
Serious problems of social integration have yet to be resolved. A peasantry and an
urban working class, for forty years taught only to follow, have finally to be
accorded full citizenship in a democratic state.
The most acute minority question concerns the status of the Hungarians of
Transylvania. Old animosities, a heritage of both the interwar period and the
Ceausescu dictatorship, have come to the surface. The issue at hand is whether
the Hungarians will have civil and human rights as members of a distinct ethnic
community with political and cultural autonomy or as individual citizens in an
47Contribufii
la studiul influentei Marii Revolutii Socialiste din Octombrie ln Romlnia (Bucharest, 1957).
48
Karl Marx, Insemnari despre Romani (Bucharest, 1964).
49
Adrian Dinu Rachieru, Vocatia sintezei: Eseuri asupra
spiritualitdiii romdne?ti (Timi?oara,
1985),
36-59.
50 Edgar Papu, "Protocronism romanesc," Secolul 20, 5-6 (1974): 8-1 1; and "Protocronism
?i
sinteza," Secolul 20, 6 (1976): 7-9.
51 See, for example, Dan Zamfirescu, Istorie
?i
cultura (Bucharest, 1975), 64-65.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992
Romania 1083
integral Romanian state. By contrast, another minority problem has become less
acute, as the Jewish community (about 20,000 members) slowly disappears,
mainly through emigration.
Yet a fundamental question, not unlike the one posed by the Junimists in the
nineteenth century, remains: Which path of development will the Romanians
choose? Formidable obstacles confront those who would resume the Western
path. The protocronists and their allies stand for tradition. Then there is the
residue of Communism. The National Salvation Front, the majority party in the
present government and dominated by former Communists, has been reluctant to
adopt Western economic institutions and on numerous occasions has violated the
letter and spirit of political democracy. Nonetheless, it has drawn support from
many who fear a free market and capitalism as well as other changes that might
jeopardize the collective benefits in employment, health care, and education,
which they had gained during the Communist period. The idea of a third way,
expounded so eloquently by the Peasantists in the interwar period and at present
nourished by a resurgent nationalism, remains an attractive alternative to the
Western (capitalist and cosmopolitan) and the Eastern (collectivist) models. The
national debate over paths of development thus shows no signs of diminishing,
and the Romanians stand as before at the crossroads of East and West.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1992